The Australian aid program faces a fundamental dilemma: how, in the absence of deep popular support, should it generate the political legitimacy required to safeguard its budget and administering institution? Australia’s Foreign Aid Dilemma tells the story of the actors who have grappled with this question over 40 years. It draws on extensive interviews and archival material to uncover how 'court politics' shapes both aid policy and administration. The lesson for scholars and practitioners is that any holistic understanding of the development enterprise must account for the complex relationship between the aid program of individual governments and the domestic political and bureaucratic contexts in which it is embedded. If the way funding is administered shapes development outcomes, then understanding the 'court politics' of aid matters. This comprehensive text will be of considerable interest to scholars and students of politics and foreign policy as well as development professionals in Australia and across the world.
This landmark reference work is the first complete history of Australia and its relationship with, and role within, the United Nations. On 17 January 1946, when the United Nations Security Council held its inaugural session, an Australian representative, Norman Makin, presided.If all members adhered to the principles of the United Nations Charter, predicted Makin, the United Nations would become "a great power for the good of the world, bringing that freedom from fear, which is necessary before we can hope for progress and welfare in all lands". Australia and the United Nations traces how Australia committed itself to the United Nations project, from before the convening of the first United Nations Security Council until the eve of its election to a fifth term on that body. The book begins with Australian involvement with the organisation that preceded the United Nations, the League of Nations. It then analyses the role played by Australian Minister for External Affairs, HV Evatt, and his staff in framing the United Nations Charter at San Francisco in 1945. Three chapters analyse Australia's diplomacy towards the Security Council, its efforts in peacekeeping, and evolving policies and attitudes towards arms control and disarmament. Two chapters discuss Australia's engagement with the United Nations' manifold specialised agencies and the role of the broader UN family in development. Another two chapters are devoted to a study of Australia's role in areas of United Nations operation only dimly foreseen by its founders at San Francisco-decolonisation and the environment. The two final chapters examine Australia's contribution to the promotion of human rights and international law and the important role it has played seeking to improve the United Nations' performance to equip it to meet new challenges in global politics. Australia and the United Nations tells us what was done in the past, and why. It is essential reading for anyone who wants to better understand Australia's multilateral diplomacy, and our future choices.
This book examines Australian colonial and foreign aid policy towards Papua New Guinea and Southeast Asia in the age of international development (1945–1975). During this period, the academic and political understandings of development consolidated and informed Australian attempts to provide economic assistance to the poorer regions to its north. Development was central to the Australian colonial administration of PNG, as well as its Colombo Plan aid in Asia. In addition to examining Australia’s perception of international development, this book also demonstrates how these debates and policies informed Australia’s understanding of its own development. This manifested itself most clearly in Australia’s behavior at the 1964 United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD). The book concludes with a discussion of development and Australian foreign aid in the decade leading up to Papua New Guinea’s independence, achieved in 1975.
Since 2009 there has been a fundamental shift in the way that the Pacific Island states engage with regional and world politics. The region has experienced, what Kiribati President Anote Tong has aptly called, a ‘paradigm shift’ in ideas about how Pacific diplomacy should be organised, and on what principles it should operate. Many leaders have called for a heightened Pacific voice in global affairs and a new commitment to establishing Pacific Island control of this diplomatic process. This change in thinking has been expressed in the establishment of new channels and arenas for Pacific diplomacy at the regional and global levels and new ways of connecting the two levels through active use of intermediate diplomatic associations. The New Pacific Diplomacy brings together a range of analyses and perspectives on these dramatic new developments in Pacific diplomacy at sub-regional, regional and global levels, and in the key sectors of global negotiation for Pacific states – fisheries, climate change, decolonisation, and trade.
From time to time, politicians describe Australia as a "good international citizen". But what does this mean, exactly? What constitutes good international citizenship? And does Australia really qualify as a good international citizen? This book attempts to answer these questions.Very little has been written about good international citizenship. Most of the limited literature is by international relations scholars and practitioners and therefore naturally tends to focus on Australian foreign policy. Nobody has ventured a definition of the term, or even a list of qualities that a good international citizen should possess. This book therefore begins by proposing such a list, and identifies two particularly important elements: compliance with international law, and support for multilateralism.Using these elements as a yardstick, Dr Pert then seeks to measure Australia''s good international citizenship throughout its post-Federation history. Account is given of the shenanigans of Billy Hughes at the 1919 peace conference in Versailles (not a great example of good international citizenship); the forgotten contribution to international economic and social cooperation of Stanley Bruce in the late 1930s; "Doc" Evatt''s astonishing performance at San Francisco in 1945, where the United Nations Charter was negotiated, and his personal influence on the form the new world organisation was to take; the almost dormant Menzies years; the Whitlam revolution and re-engagement with the world; and the Fraser reaction. The analysis continues with the Hawke/Keating, Howard, and Rudd/Gillard governments.One of the main conclusions the book draws from this analysis is that states - whether Australia or others such as the archetypically "good" Scandinavian states - can be paragons of good international citizenship in one area (say, overseas aid) but the opposite in another (such as repulsion of asylum-seekers, or arms exports). Thus, it argues, "good international citizenship" is not a blanket term that can be applied to a state. Instead, a state can be a good international citizen in some areas, and quite the opposite in others. A full account of how Australia rates from this perspective is given from Federation to the demise of the second Rudd government in 2013.___________________________________________________________________Good International Citizenship: Values and Interests in Foreign PolicymakingAddress by Professor the Hon Gareth Evans AC QC FASSA FAIIA to Sydney University Law School, 27 August 2015"[T]hat is about as far as I have taken the concept of good international citizenship in my own speeches and writings over the last three decades. But I am delighted to acknowledge, in her presence here this evening, that we now have a scholar, Sydney University''s Dr Alison Pert, who has taken the idea a good deal further in her book Australia as a Good International Citizen, published last year.Alison has done not only scholars but policymakers a great service in this book. For a start, she focuses far more concentrated attention than I ever did on defining the core idea of good international citizenship, and teasing out all its possible dimensions: not just support for multilateralism, and willingness to "pitch in" to international tasks, and doing "international good deeds", on which I have tended to focus, but also compliance with international law, and leadership in improving or raising international standards.Overall, the practical relevance of Alison Pert''s very scholarly work is that she gives our foreign policy makers, and those elsewhere, in effect a whole new set of talking points to use in persuading possibly reluctant domestic audiences that pursuing "purposes beyond ourselves" is not a fringe activity best left to missionaries and the naïve, but something that every state worth the name should be doing, by which it will be judged by the rest of the world, and by which its citizens will directly benefit if it gets it right." Read the full Speech...In the media...Australians at their best, Governor-General''s Boyer Lectures, ABC RN, Nov 2013 Read transcript or Listen to audio...
'No nation can escape its geography', warned Percy Spender, Australia's Minister for External Affairs, in 1950. With the immediate turmoil of World War II over, communism and decolonisation had ended any possibility that Asia could continue to be ignored by Australia. In the early 1950s, Australia embarked on its most ambitious attempt to engage with Asia: the Colombo Plan. This book examines the public and private agendas behind Australia's foreign aid diplomacy and reveals the strategic, political and cultural aims that drove the Colombo Plan. It examines the legacy of WWII, how foreign aid was seen as crucial to achieving regional security, how the plan was sold to Australian and Asian audiences, and the changing nature of Australia's relationship with Britain and the United States. Above all this is the question of how Australia sought to project itself into the region, and how Asia was introduced into the Australian consciousness. In answering these questions, this book tells the story of how an insular society, deeply scarred by the turbulence of war, chose to face its regional future.
This is a good time to reflect on opportunities and challenges for Australia in Latin America. Impressive economic growth and opportunities for trade and investment have made Latin America a dynamic area for Australia and the Asia Pacific region. A growing Latin American population, Australia’s attractiveness to Latin American students, a fascination with the cultural vibrancy of the Americas and an awareness of Latin America’s increasingly independent stance in politics and economic diplomacy, have all contributed to raising the region’s profile. This collection of essays provides the first substantial introduction to Australia’s evolving engagement with Latin America, identifying current trends and opportunities, and making suggestions about how relationships in trade, investment, foreign aid, education, culture and the media could be strengthened.
This book introduces the editors’ new concept of “Awkward Powers”. By undertaking a critical re-examination of the state of International Relations theorising on the changing nature of the global power hierarchy, it draws attention to a number of countries that fit awkwardly into existing but outdated categories such as “great power” and “middle power”. It argues that conceptual categories pertaining to the apex of the international hierarchy have become increasingly unsatisfactory, and that new approaches focusing on such “Awkward Powers” can both rectify shortcomings on power theorising whilst shining a much-needed theoretical spotlight on significant but understudied states. The book’s contributors examine a broad range of empirical case studies, including both established and rising powers across a global scale to illustrate our conceptual claims. Through such a novel process, we argue that a better appreciation of the de facto international power hierarchy in the 21st century can be achieved.
Originally published in 1986, this book evaluated the review of the Australian Overseas Aid Program (the 1984 Jackson Report) and discusses the significance of Australia’s contribution to overseas aid for the future. The book focusses on the overall context of the Jackson report; discusses the geographical distribution of aid proposed by the report and examines aid administration in its more specific bureaucratic context and with broader questions of community participation in developmental processes.
